Review: Minecraft: Story Mode – The Complete Adventure

If you’ve played a Telltale video game since the fantastic The Walking Dead series, you should know what to expect. Minecraft Story Mode adapts to the Telltale formula quite well and even though it doesn’t do much new, the complete series that contains episodes 1-8 is an enjoyable adventure, despite a slow start. I found the second half of the story more interesting than the first half, but the former half sets up the characters and that’s what makes the latter half so enjoyable.

With any modern Telltale game, quick-time events, light puzzle-solving and dialogue choices are prevalent. These mechanics are used over and over again until the end is reached. A small welcome change that fits the Minecraft procedure is the ability to craft items. Over time, you can gather materials that allows you to build new items and weapons. Most of these are scripted moments, meaning that when you need to build something, the game is telling you to build it. For non-seasoned Minecraft fans like myself, there are recipes shown to teach you how to build each of the items you need to craft.

One detail that changes from the Telltale formula, is you can choose from a variety of ways you want the main character, Jesse, to look and sound. Jesse can either be a boy or a girl and you can choose from different variations of him/her. I chose to play as a female Jesse and I really enjoyed her performance throughout the entire season. Each character delivers their lines admirably, and their delivery and dialogue lead to their characters believability. The character Ivor in particular gets better as the series continued, and he became my favorite character by the end.

The series had its ups and downs, especially with episode 2, which was the shortest episode, and almost nothing of consequence happened. One of my favorite episodes was episode 6, where the setup is a murder mystery. It evoked the feeling of The Wolf Among Us, another Telltale series. While the first 4 episodes follow a certain storyline, episodes 5-8 had a new premise every single time, and I think that’s why I enjoyed the second half of the series more.

Choices in the game don’t seem to have much consequence, as most of the time the story wrapped back around and nothing really seemed to have mattered. One choice early on in the season determines which path you take. It does change up the gameplay, but the same story comes together. Minecraft Story Mode doesn’t drastically change regardless of what decisions you make. The in-game statistics on what percentage of the community chose which decision is still nice.

The final episode, A Journey’s End?, concludes the series on a high note. It may not be the best episode of the series, but it brings everything that has happened in the previous 7 episodes together to great effect. Numerous callbacks to earlier moments in the series makes it feel like a complete series and you really feel like you’re finally completing an adventure with these cast of characters. Minecraft Story Mode has been enjoyable over these 8 episodes and who knows if more episodes or a new season will arrive. Telltale Games has adapted its style of gameplay to Minecraft pretty well, and I would welcome more adventures in the Minecraft world.

I’ve written at length over time about Minecraft Story Mode this past year and for impressions of episodes 1-7, they can be found below: